On Chinese Topic Sentence In C-E Translation

According to Li&Thompson’s typology of language (1976), English issubject-prominent, of which the key is subject-predicate structure, a highlygrammatical and closed structure to which the other elements can be attached in termsof grammatical rules. Predicate must be in agreement with its subject grammatically.Semantically, there is a direct selectional relationship between subject and predicate.In a word, an English sentence is controlled by its subject and predicate with bothgrammar and meaning as underlying rules.Unlike English, Chinese is topic-prominent. The head of a sentence is topic,which is usually definite and takes initial position of the sentence. Topic is what thesentence talks about. It’s the focus of the discourse and the start of the sentenceinformation. Comments follow the topic in a logical order rather than a grammaticalorder. This kind of sentence structure does not have comprehensive grammatical rules.Meaning rather than grammar is the key factor. Grammatically, there is notopic-comment agreement. There is no need to care too much about some grammaticalissues such as word class and word form if the topic is set. Comments just have to berelated to the topic in meaning. On the whole, topic-comment sentences, the mainsentence type in Chinese, are led by topic and based on mainly a single-tracksystem—meaning.Respecting all the differences in sentence structures, the thesis holds that thereare some practical modes for topic-subject conversion, which, however, involvesmany grammatical issues such as transitivity in meaning, subject-predicate agreement,etc.The significance of the thesis lies on three levels. First, since previous studies onC-E translation mainly focus on the analysis of differences between sentencestructures, it is an innovative attempt to propose some operable modes fortopic-subject conversion. Second, it consolidates the theoretical framework of C-E translation. Third, the thesis sheds a new light on translation teaching. It argues that itis necessary for the translator to understand the source language appropriately andchoose natural target language instead of making complete formal equivalencetranslation.